Abstract

We present the laser-induced ultrafast spin and rotational dynamics in a cobalt trimer cation cluster. With the help of an attached CO ligand which lowers the high symmetry of the cluster, a local spin switch within around 500 fs is achieved. Furthermore, by including an additional degree of freedom in our calculations, i.e., molecular rotation, we investigate the possibility of laser-induced ultrafast molecular rotational control in both a model system and our studied realistic cluster. The results indicate that both spin and molecular rotation can be manipulated with ultrashort laser pulses at subpicosecond timescales, a fact which provides significant theoretical guidance for the design of spin logic nanodevices and sheds some light on the application-oriented path for driving molecular directional motions.

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Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge the financial support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grants No. 11504223 and No. 11572251), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Grant No. GK201503019), the Natural Science Basic Research Plan in Shaanxi Province of China (Grant No. 2014JQ1003), and the German Research Foundation (DFG) through the Transregional Collaborative Research Centers SFB/TRR 88 “3MET” and SFB/TRR 173 “Spin+X”.